We’re going to admit it. We’re going to say it. Just give us a second to gather the courage, remove the self-consciousness, find our convictions to stand behind.

Yesterday, we saw He’s Just Not That Into You.

And we are, in a way, that into it.

Mostly because of the, ahem, Role of Design. The slight strangeness of its Baltimore location aside, the movie plays with architecture and design in a way that bridges the architecture-makes-you-cool overtness of a film like, say, My Super Ex-Girlfriend (Luke Wilson is architect and therefore attractive) and the grittily appealing sets of Addicted to Love. Unfortunately, He’s Just Not That Into You plays houses and their decor as one-to-one metaphor for its characters and their inner lives. A quick run-down:

Jennifer Connelly’s cuckolded housewife of a character is mid-renovation and obsessed with Dwell. An early scene shows her, sitting alone on a half-tarped couch, alone and flipping through the pages and therefore, clearly, lonely and sad. Husband arrives, flings the magazine on the floor. She doesn’t need it. She has him. (Too bad he has Scarlett Johansson.)

Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck split a cool loft that has a painting with the word Should repeated all over it. This is metaphor.

Justin Long lives in a loft that has restaurant fittings in the kitchen. They are spare and steel. This is because he is a spare man of steel emotions, and is, at least until the last three minutes, extremely afraid to let anyone in, lest they hurt him/achieve intimacy/pick-your-garden-variety. So he hides in a labyrinth of “that was fun” and “I’m just not that into you.” A labyrinth exactly like his loft layout!

Gigi lives in an overstuffed-furniture-filled apartment and has a pink landline phone. Really, producers? A landline??

Colin Firth visits a Spanish—f*ck, wrong movie—Bradley Cooper, we mean, works in a shiny office with big windows and a lockable door. This is because he is on one hand a shiny rat bastard (Kid. We love.), and on the other hand a person who is at once transparently obvious (“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” he says to a suddenly naked ScarJo) and locked behind a door of American Spirit secrets.

Oh, and something about E trying to buy Scarlett a house with an ironing board.

On the one hand, this is great. How we live and the objects we surround ourselves with are as integral parts of our identities as what we wear and how we eat. On the other hand, this movie is so stripped-down, the metaphors so lacking in any kind of openness or interpretability, that aesthetic becomes a tool of oppression. Connelly and Bradley’s house is a study in Pottery Barn and teal, her “this tile is too small” post-affair-discovery moment an attempted riff on Lost in Translation’s brilliant “I like the burgundy,” but the demise of their relationship is so apparent from the dark palette of their brand new house that even we could see it coming from the very first scene. And the throwing away of Dwell? Girlfriend likes eco-conscious prefab. Let her.

As for the rest? Let’s just say that we hope the next one out is a little subtler, a little quieter, a little less in-your-face. Because the combination of this attention and a little more care, and we’d be Really Just Totally Into It.